Home is where… ?

A lot of my writing explores the theme of "home", whether directly or indirectly.  In my worlds, home and family tend to be things that are created and worked for, rather than given.  If a character ends up in the same place they started, I feel like I haven't done my job as a writer.  (Well, honestly, if a character in any book I'm reading winds up exactly the same on the last page as they were on the first, I die a little inside.)

Many of my characters have nomadic tendencies, no matter what they use to get around.  (Solar-powered flying car?  Check.  Someone else's spaceship that they've "borrowed"?  Check.)  I like taking that old saying, "Home is where the heart is", and going one further.  Home is the people you love, maybe even the people you hate.  It's simultaneously the place you seek your whole life, and the place that drove you to move, to change, to be more than you were.

As long as I'm dishing out the trite sayings, let me share another.  "Bloom where you are planted."  Maybe you've seen it stitched on a sampler, or as a bumper sticker slapped on the back of a dirty Subaru.  I don't mean it in the Pollyanna-everything-is-always-light-and-beauty way.  It resonates with me, and within my writing.  Not because it demands that you open your arms and sing while the world covers you in dirt, but because it illustrates that the point isn't where you started, or even what you become.

The point is to keep growing.